Marriage Matters: When life throws you a learning curve

Saturday

Dec 21, 2013 at 12:00 PM

Audora recently asked a young mother how life was going since their new baby joined the family. “It’s a learning curve,” she said.

By James and Audora Burg

Audora recently asked a young mother how life was going since their new baby joined the family. “It’s a learning curve,” she said.She was surprised by the answer, because it had not been that many years since her friend’s other children, now 4 and 6, were babies.But the more Audora pondered the unexpected response, the more she liked it. What a gentle way of expressing acceptance of what can be a very challenging adjustment in life, especially when parents had adapted to life with their older children who had outgrown being all-needy newborns.Audora confronted an example of her own learning curve last weekend, when she put the final stitches in the Christmas stocking for our second child. Unlike the 14-year-long, on-again off-again stitching saga that accompanied our eldest’s stocking, this creation spanned only four years.It was gratifying to regard the two stockings, side by side. Not only do they represent untold hours of a mother’s investment in her children’s seasonal happiness, they also bear witness to a stitcher’s progress. When she embarked on the first stocking 18 years ago, she was new to cross-stitching. To have taken on such a challenging project as one of her first efforts surpassed ambitious and bordered on foolhardy. As learning curves go, this one was treacherously steep. But she worked her way through it, learning as she went.Much as those parents are doing with their new baby. Much as any couple does when they enter marriage.Implied in that phrase “learn as you go” is the uncomfortable truth that you might as well say, “I will make mistakes along the way.” But just as the average newlywed couple cannot expect to immediately have the same financial standard of living that their parents took two decades to achieve, a similar mindset should apply to relationship skills.Additionally, couples have to discover and develop the skill sets that work best for their relationship. That is, getting good at being married takes time and experience -- and the humility to make it right after you get it wrong.There are ways to smooth out your own learning curve, by reaping the benefit of others’ experience on this same curve. That’s where the time-honored concept of marriage mentors comes in.While some mentors, in a formal role, receive training and enter into a purposeful mentor relationship, most mentor couples never know that they are mentors; they are couples who have learned from their own struggles and are simply living out marriage in a way that educates, supports, and nurtures other couples.Smooth or bumpy, life itself is one continuous learning curve.

James Burg, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Indiana University-Purdue, Fort Wayne. His wife, Audora, is a freelance writer. You may contact them at marriage@charter.net.